With the proliferation of digital cameras, numerous online photosharing services have emerged and are becoming widely accepted by photo enthusiasts. The photosharing services are generally based on one of two architectures. The first is a centrally hosted architecture where a central server hosts digital images for a number of users and provides photosharing services by serving the digital images to a web browser of a user or guest. The second is a peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture where a user creates and stores photo albums on the user's computer. The user's computer then operates as a web server to provide the photo albums to the web browser of another user or guest.
One issue with online photosharing services is controlling access to photo albums. Typical online photosharing systems control access on a per image basis or a per album basis. Each image or photo album may be classified as private such that it is not shared or as public such that it is shared with all guests. Some systems allow the owner of the image or photo album to define a list of permitted guests for each digital image or photo album. However, these systems do not take advantage of keywords used by an owner to tag digital assets. Thus, there remains a need for a system and method of controlling access to digital assets in an online media sharing system based on keywords used to tag the digital assets.